The tools for the Unity gaming platform in Visual Studio have been improved in a new preview.

Visual Studio Tools for Unity 3 (VSTU) is Microsoft’s free Visual Studio add-on that lets you work with the Unity gaming tools and platform.

Unity is a multiplatform game engine, that you can use to develop and deploy games to mobile, VR, desktop, Web, Console and TV platforms.

VSTU 3 Preview is part of the tools for Game Development with Unity that is part of the Visual Studio 2017 RC installer, and is also available for Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 on the Visual Studio Gallery. The improvements have mainly been made in the areas of code editing and debugging.

You now get code coloration for Unity messages and event functions, so they stand out from other methods in the editor.

The preview also now plugs into Visual Studio’s C# IntelliSense engine to provide code completion for Unity messages. If you start declaring a method, and if you’re in a class that supports Unity messages, IntelliSense will kick-in and show you the list of Unity messages your script can implement.

The expression evaluator has also been improved. This displays the values of the Locals and the results of the expressions you input into the Watch and Immediate Window. The improved version behaves more like the .NET debugger.

The debugger has new support for a variety of expressions, including string concat, direct cast, and is, as, default and new. There's also support for creating new temporary variables, and for implicit private conversions. The developers say they've alsoadded better error messages when a type is expected or not found.

The wizards have been improved with support for Unity messages in non Behaviour types such as Editor or EditorWindow; and they've switched to Roslyn to inject and format Unity messages.

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